And I, God help me, called his coldness distraction, for far too long.

Everyone in his life had spent decades handing Arthur the merciful word for what he did, and the mercy had not made him better.

It had made him worse, because a man who is always given the gentle interpretation never has to face the true one, and a man who never faces the true one never changes.

So no, I would not give him mistake. Not because I wanted to wound him, but because it would have been one more lie in a life already drowning in them, and because the one thing I could still do for him, the last honest gift left to give, was to name what he had actually done in the actual words for it, and let him stand inside the truth of himself, perhaps for the very first time.

A mistake is a typo.

What he did, he chose.